The Best Time To Be On Twitter
When is twitter best for you?
You may have heard that sociologists from Cornell University have recently studied hundreds of millions of twitter messages, trying to see when people were most happy and when they started to become blue. To conduct their research, they compiled a huge database of tweets-up to 400 tweets from each of 2.4 million people, from February 2008 to January 2010.
But guess what? They made this database open to the public, at http://timeu.se. For this, we have Scott Golder, a graduate student in the Social Dynamics Lab in the Department of Sociology at Cornell to thank. (He's @redlog on twitter)
Say you're a small business owner, and you want to know when people are most likely to be on twitter tweeting about your products or products related to yours. If you've got a high-end ice cream you want people to try, type "ice cream" into the database, and you'll get a graph that looks like this:
This might imply that if you're using twitter to promote your ice cream, you might get more mileage out of tweeting at eight at night rather than at four in the afternoon.
"Insurance" seems to be a bigger topic on Tuesdays than on Fridays.
This could also help companies improve their customer service. The term "Comcast," for example, peaks dramatically early Thursday mornings. It seems unlikely that a whole bunch of people are going online to sing the company's praises at that time. (Although that could be when the company's public relations folks do a lot of tweeting) Maybe it's time to take another look at where the trucks are at that time.
The only downside is that this database looks only at historical information. So even if Comcast makes big changes to its schedules and service, the chart will remain the same.
How could you use this information to help your business or career?
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Kimberly Weisul is a freelance writer, editor and editorial consultant. Follow her on twitter (of course!) at www.twitter.com/weisul.